“We the People" are not enemies of the state and deserve and need to know what our government is doing. The truth matters – particularly when human freedom is at stake, and our shared environment is collapsing, with both at risk of being lost forever. America’s civil liberties have been trampled on, and sadly, most don’t seem to care, failing to understand the full implications of big brother’s ascendancy. Defending freedom from government tyranny is not a left-or-right, conservative-or-liberal matter; it is the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, liberty and enslavement, life and death.

Edward Snowden has revealed the extent to which America has become a total surveillance police state – with wholesale spying upon its own citizens – adding to revelations since 9/11 of the murder of U.S. citizens as well as torture, indefinite detention, and pursuit of drone perma-war, terrorizing entire nations. All of these acts are occurring upon the basis of suspicion alone – without due legal process, violating international law and the U.S. Constitution – in an unprecedented expansion of government powers in the name of a war on terror, when in fact they are being used to control dissent and access oil.

President Barack Obama is a profound epic failure, in many ways worse than Über-fascist Bush, just a new black face on the American oil oligarchy’s long history of tyranny and warmongering. What a feeble, sellout, murdering, cynical disappointment Barack Obama has turned out to be. After killing a million Arabs and Muslims, Bush policies continued with vigor under Obama, has the U.S. avenged 9/11 yet? Or does America need to spy, torture, falsely imprison, and wage perma-war for years longer? Perhaps forever?

America is poised upon the precipice of becoming a totalitarian police state overseeing final global environmental collapse. As America is at risk of becoming a third-rate police state, all lovers of liberty – from the Tea Party to progressives – must come together to resist oppression, remain free, embrace justice and equity for all, and sustain our shared global environment. One can feel a libertarian–progressive alliance building to stop big nanny government from enslaving us while destroying our environment. A commitment to Green Liberty is the human family’s only path to sustained well-being.

What has America become? It is well past time for the U.S. to reexamine its incautious, militaristic and totalitarian response to 9/11 and re-embrace liberty, justice, and freedom. The U.S. corporate-owned government threatens global liberty and human rights, making global equity, justice, and sustainability impossible. Big nanny government is in bed with the oil oligarchy and corporate elite to threaten American and global liberty and ecosystems.

What other unethical, illegal, violent and unauthorized acts have the U.S. government carried out in secret to keep us "safe"? 9/11 trauma does NOT justify spying, torture, murder, and perma-war – along with corporate rule, the textbook definition of fascism. Real Americans who honor the Constitution and American values understand that withstanding occasional acts of random terror and minimizing their frequency is the price of freedom.

America folded like a wet towel after the 9/11 crimes – lashing out militaristically and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents – as it needlessly gave up Yankee liberties acquired over hundreds of years in what had been the biggest expansion of personal and political freedoms ever. Instead, the United States should be engaging with the world to address justified grievances, weaning itself from its oil addiction, demobilizing the military and police state, and strengthening international criminal courts to charge and imprison terrorists.

Do we want the executive branch of government to know every detail of each citizen’s life? Never has a government been granted powers that don’t end up being expanded and misused. The slippery slope of good intentions guarantees that spying as a shortcut for security means dissidents, oddballs, artists, and ordinary citizens who resist the political and economic elite will be targeted next. The military-industrial-Congressional complex has morphed to include the National Security Agency and Homeland Security’s fascist state of perma-war and spying.

What Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have done to roll back civil liberties may not at first sight seem so terrible, but what will subsequent Presidents do with these powers to spy, torture, imprison, and murder at will? What further will be lost the next time criminal terrorists strike? President Barack Obama took our hunger for hope and change and gave us a totalitarian police state in what can only be characterized as an epic failure, a grand bait and switch, which is the most recent fascist coup waged upon American liberty.

A truly great nation refuses to falsely trade liberty for security, which assures neither and only enslaves people in pervasive terror.

With torture, spying, murder, and perma-war, all three branches of the U.S. government – the President, Congress, and courts – have abused the Constitution and lost all legitimacy. From this point forward, it is only a hop, skip, and jump to an iron-fisted authoritarian dictatorship. The entire American citizenry – and soon global humanity – is now assumed to be guilty and data-mined for evidence, on the presumption that everyone is a terrorist until proven innocent.

Something has gone terribly wrong with the American project – the greatest expansion of liberty and well-being in history (although it always existed upon a shaky economic and ecological basis). Meaningless American political rhetoric’s reference to liberty, exceptionalism, and equality are at odds with the reality of spying and murdering in the name of security.

Edward Snowden is an American patriot who has further revealed the extent to which America has become a fascist police state that systematically violates civil liberties to keep us "safe." His observation that “the government has granted itself power it is not entitled [to]” is spot-on. Whistleblowers against militarism, civil liberty abuses, and ecocide are global heroes – and acting upon their courageous disclosures provides humanity’s last chance for a just, free, equitable and sustainable future.

A technological security state has been established that fundamentally threatens civil liberties and environmental sustainability. The protest and regime change necessary to address fossil fuel addiction and abrupt climate change – and other social changes necessary to bring about a just, equitable, sustainable, and universally free world – are being violently suppressed by the police state, as social change of any sort that threatens the oppressive and unjust status quo is labeled terrorism.

Who protects us from the government? America has become a two-party fascist state. President Obama's message of progressive hope has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare – as the government he leads spies on and murders its own citizens; while torturing, falsely imprisoning, and waging drone based perma-war terrorizing innocents. Critics are harassed by the IRS, as the media are bullied into silence. This failed Presidency has further laid the groundwork for final collapse of U.S. liberty under the guise of security, while ignoring immediate threats posed by abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse.

President Barack Obama's drone perma-war is terrorism, traumatizing innocent populations, murdering thousands to keep the oil flowing and America overconsuming its unfair share of global resources. The absence of major terrorist attacks since 9/11 is due more to the small number and weakness of terrorist wackos than the incautious American military and antidemocratic response.

Now that President Obama has set the precedent of murdering U.S. citizens without trial, what can we expect from successors? Given the steady erosion of civil liberties by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, how long until drones circle U.S. cities murdering citizens on suspicion alone? It's not as unlikely as it once seemed.

Social media and the Internet in general fundamentally threaten the system of coercion and misinformation upon which the ruling oligarchy depend to stifle dissent so that they may continue to plunder the planet. That is why President Obama and many other dictators seek to monitor and control it.

Until now the Chinese government has set the standard for repressive, tyrannical, and ecocidal regimes. Now it is clear that when President Obama and Chinese President Xi next meet, they can compare and share citizen spying and repression tools, ways to avoid cutting emissions to urgently limit abrupt climate change, and how best to control and murder opponents of their police states.

Collapsing ecosystems and the inability of the perpetual growth paradigm to meet ever-growing population’s consumption demands are leading to fascism to prop up the system. A surveillance-free Internet is key to humanity's chance to remain free, achieve equity and justice, and avoid global ecosystem collapse. In an age of democratic police states – where speaking freely and calling for regime change are thought crimes – it is hard to imagine a way to full spectrum sustainability sufficient to avoid ecosystem collapse.

There is NEVER any justification in a democratic society to spy on, torture, murder, or wage perma-war upon citizens and sovereign nations to keep us “safe.” Free speech and privacy are human rights that must be made universal and defended at all cost. Without the liberty required for the people to change governments as necessary, there is no path to avoid global ecosystem collapse.

The United States must repeal the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 rollbacks of civil liberties, dismantle the nascent police state including the NSA, stop spying upon and murdering citizens, end the state of perma-war terrorizing the world while killing innocents, and address abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse, the real and immediate security threat to us all. Otherwise there is going to be a revolution.

America and the world must never give up its hard-fought freedom because of terrorists, inside or outside of government. It is time for the U.S. and the world to recommit to justice, liberty, peace, equity, ecological sustainability, and the rule of law.

Dr. Glen Barry is the President and Founder of Ecological Internet (EI). He is recognized internationally by the environmental movement as a leading global visionary, ecological policy critic and public intellectual committed to communicating the severity of global ecological crises - and related justice, rights and equity issues - while actively organizing with others sufficient solutions